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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT’ REVIEW: TENDER COMRADES  
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Manohla Dargis
November 14, 2024
The New York Times
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_ In Payal Kapadia’s extraordinary film, three women in Mumbai
search for connections amid the city’s vibrant and darkly alienating
churn. _

'All We Imagine As Light', The American French Film Festival

 

“All We Imagine as Light” is a quiet drama about fragility, beauty
and kinship, and what it takes to keep going in ordinary, difficult
times. Set in contemporary Mumbai, it centers on three Hindu women,
their everyday lives and the bonds that they share with one another as
well as with the larger world. It’s the kind of modestly scaled and
lightly plotted international movie — with characters who look and
sound like real people, and whose waking hours are set to the pulse of
life — that can get lost amid the year-end glut of Oscar-grubbing
titles. So, it’s worth mentioning upfront that it is also flat-out
wonderful, one of finest of the year.

The women work together at a busy city hospital, where two are nurses
and the third is a cook. The nurses, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), who looks
to be in her late 30s, and the much younger Anu (Divya Prabha), are
roommates and living with a runaway cat in a small, cluttered
apartment. Both nurses have complicated personal lives. Prabha’s
husband left her behind to work in Germany and has drifted away from
her, leaving her achingly alone. Anu has a secret lover, a young,
earnest Muslim man she’s trying to keep hidden from everyone,
including her family and Prabha, a reserved woman of decorous
sensitivity.

The story develops organically to incorporate the cook, Parvaty
(Chhaya Kadam), a headstrong, middle-age widow. She’s struggling to
stay in the apartment that she had shared with her husband, which
developers now plan to raze. They’ve threatened her, if she
doesn’t leave on their timeline (they’ve sent goons to her door),
but Parvaty talks tough and conveys a resiliency bordering on
obstinacy. When Prabha finds a lawyer to support her through her legal
troubles, Parvaty flatly rejects the offer. “I don’t need any
help,” she says with her back turned to Prabha. Like the two nurses,
Parvaty seems determined to go it alone.

In time, all three the women grow closer, and their lives become more
intertwined, a shift that the writer-director Payal Kapadia develops
with unforced naturalness and a remarkable lightness of touch. Kapadia
has a background in documentary — this is the first feature-length
fiction film she’s directed — and she integrates brief streets
scenes of a thrumming Mumbai throughout “All We Imagine as Light.”
Crucially, she opens the movie with a series of nighttime images of
unidentified men and women working and wandering about the city,
milling through busy streets, riding on crowded trains, visuals that
she overlays with voices speaking different languages. “I was
pregnant,” says one woman, “but I didn’t tell anyone.”

This opening — with its seductive blur of anonymous voices and
moving, always moving bodies — efficiently sets the scene and tone.
As important, it also introduces a characteristic modernist concern
with the attractions and the drawbacks of cities, with their frenetic
swarms and cacophonous din, their liberating and soul-crushing
anonymity. The city gives and it takes in equal measure, though not
always fairly. It’s where Anu and her lover, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon),
can escape and melt into the crowd to hold hands, yet the city
imperils Parvaty and may leave her stranded amid the clutter of
fast-rising luxury towers. “Class is a privilege,” a billboard for
one such tower blares. “Reserved for the privileged.”

Though all the women receive their due, Prabha is the most central and
vividly drawn. Physically reserved, with deep-set eyes that shuttle
between searching openness and downcast reserve, she is revealed
gradually and often through her interactions with others. She’s
unassuming, polite to the point of deference and seemingly unaware of
her striking looks. When a doctor, Manoj (Azees Nedumangad),
approaches her one night, asking if she’s been working late, she
apologizes without apparent reason. “Sorry doctor,” she says,
seemingly oblivious of his interest in her, “I lost track of
time.” When they go their separate ways, he gives her a poem that he
wrote for a competition, though also perhaps for her.

The doctor’s interest, or maybe the word “time,” seems to awaken
something in Prabha, and Kapadia’s realism becomes more lyrical.
That evening, Prabha returns home to find that her husband has sent
her a new rice cooker but no note. Later, she slips out of the room
she shares with Anu and sits before an open window to read the
doctor’s poem. “My dreams are made of everyday things, small and
scattered, that I’ve left behind,” you hear a man in voice-over,
his words rising above the urban hum. On another evening, Prabha sits
on the floor of her kitchen and folds her body around the rice cooker,
an image so suffused in longing — for the absent husband, a family
home or maybe just a caress — that it pierces the heart

Midway through “All We Imagine as Light,” after the doctor has
made some sweets for Prabha and after Anu has tried out a disguise to
slip into her lover’s neighborhood, Parvaty arrives at a crossroads
and the story takes a turn, too. The three women leave the city for a
coastal village and the movie slips into a more peaceful,
contemplative register, as if it were taking a great big breath of
fresh air along with the characters. The tempo eases a bit, though it
never approaches the glacial pace that has become a stultifying tic in
certain art movies. One of the pleasures of Kapadia’s filmmaking is
that she’s inviting you to discover her characters on their terms,
which means embracing the inner and outer rhythms of _their_ lives.

It’s at this beachside idyll that the story’s fragments; its
swirling themes and the women’s desires — including the need to be
held in another’s embrace, whether of one person or of a community
— converge. It’s shockingly beautiful. “All We Imagine as
Light” is a drama about life’s fragility, but it’s also about
nurturance. That may sound as precious as a homily straight out of
Sundance, but it’s just the reverse. Kapadia’s three women have
troubles, but she isn’t asking for your pity, and she doesn’t
sweeten their difficulties to make them more palatable for your
sensitivities. Instead, she is offering you the gift of three lives
that may seem altogether different from your own but are also and,
finally, transcendently familiar.

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters.

 

 

* Film
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* Film Review
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* 'All We Imagine As Light'
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* Payal Kapadia
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* Mumbai
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* Hindu Women
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